It is an archaic enterprise in some ways: sonnet after sonnet, laid out, equally weighted like so many sandbags, with the capitalisation at the start of each line adding to the weight. The Bremer River, in ‘A Strong Brown God’, tells us its story, a kind of seduction by European settlers that becomes a sour marriage, full of vengeful floods and drownings. There is a definite undertow, and Dionysius makes a great character of the river: not wise, really, just old and sick of humanity: ‘But I wait for the day my real father surfaces again, when / His tide washes over your homes & I join eternally within. / His long navy cloak will wrap around me, my brown robe will soak into his salty dye.’

Later, Dionysius shows us the river and urban man in full conflict, from the human side in ‘Ghouls’, with its a marvellous mixture of rubbish, silt, and social observation. Throughout, Dionysius’s language plays at the very edge of its capacity, with quite a few unwieldy, distracting similes and misjudged solemnities. But his metaphors are something else: and the final poem sequence, ‘Cicada’ employs a sustained, intricate metaphor that takes the book somewhere else entirely, drily and unforgettably.